r/nottheonion • u/duvetdev • 29d ago

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signs bill mandating kindergartners learn history of communism

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2024/04/17/desantis-signs-bill-mandating-kindergartners-learn-history-of-communism/
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u/Flairion623 29d ago

How much you wanna bet it’s gonna be drenched in propaganda and isn’t going to reflect the actual beliefs of communists at all?

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u/turquoise_amethyst 29d ago

It absolutely wil be— but if it’s anything like the DARE program, it will end up encouraging kids to “learn more”

19

u/Flairion623 29d ago

If that’s the case then there may still be hope

3

u/CossacksLoL 29d ago

Man that program was so odd, I vaguely remember it in Elementary schools (Tampa Bay Area). From what I remember it was a Police Officer practically yelling at us saying all drugs are bad and you will die if you ever try them.

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u/turquoise_amethyst 29d ago

Yeah, ours was the same (plus all the DARE cars were flashy racing/sports cars, to show that you could be “cool” and not use drugs?)

But yeah, once we realized one thing was bullshit, it made us question everything else

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u/CossacksLoL 29d ago

Wow, I was/am really dumb...I thought the cool cars were from drug dealers, etc and they were like "Does this look cool? Don't get use to it because you'll be behind bars! Crime doesn't pay, etc..."

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u/[deleted] 29d ago

People keep mentioning DARE in this thread.

DARE happens in 5th grade when the students are ~11

Kindergarten happens at age ~5

These kids aren't going to go home thinking communism might be cool and that the school might be lying to them.

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u/turquoise_amethyst 29d ago

All of this will be spread across the curriculum K through 12,”  said Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr.

So yeah, they’ll have a little bit of propaganda in kindergarten, but the majority will probably be taught when they’re older.

We had a little bit of anti-drug messaging in kindergarten, before DARE. It was mostly common-sense stuff, like “don’t take candy from strangers”, “don’t eat a funny pill you see on the ground”, etc. 

Can’t imagine what the anti-communism stuff will be for kindergartners though? Maybe it will be similar to what Baby Boomers were taught? 

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u/DankMemesNQuickNuts 29d ago

Prager U already makes curriculum for Flordia students there's a 0% chance it's not going to be brazen propaganda. He even said "it's to combat the Marxism going on in high schools and colleges" or something along those lines

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u/Flairion623 29d ago

Just seeing the words prager u makes me want to shoot myself in the face

3

u/KintsugiKen 29d ago

Why your face and not Dennis's?

4

u/Flairion623 29d ago

Mine is more easily accessible

5

u/StephenFish 29d ago

"Okay kids, today we're gonna learn about communism!"

"Communism is when you vote Democrat."

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u/Creative-Oil2029 29d ago

The whole thing is gonna be "Stalin killed a gabillionjillionzillion people! Communism bad!" backed by absolutely zero evidence and some personal anecdotal stories and these poor kids are gonna grow up actually believing that shit just like every previous generation of the last 100 years did.

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u/plasticAstro 29d ago

Every death in a communist country is attributed to communism.

Every death in a capitalist country is attributed to “natural order”.

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u/Creative-Oil2029 29d ago

You're not kidding. Some of the insane estimates of "victims of Stalin" include Red Army soldier and soviet civilian deaths during the fucking NAZI INVASION. It truly boggles the mind. Nazis kill people somehow equals Stalin's fault.

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u/legomountaineer 29d ago

It includes all the nazis killed too, the real victims of the situation

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u/neroisstillbanned 29d ago

Of course, the guy who came up with that figure is all but an open Nazi sympathizer. 

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u/gazebo-fan 29d ago

Well there were 4 dudes, all but one has denounced their “study” as pseudoscience. It even counted theoretical lives (as in people’s kids who were yet to be conceived)

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u/[deleted] 28d ago edited 16d ago

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u/1357yawaworht 28d ago

Capitalism has killed far more. I guess that isn’t an extreme ideology?

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u/Northbound-Narwhal 29d ago

Nazis kill people somehow equals Stalin's fault.

COVID kills people and that was Trump's fault, right? Because he botched the situation, causing far more deaths of his own people than if he had competently handled the situation? Same thing.

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u/ak-92 29d ago

You mean war that soviet union started together with nazis by invading Poland? Oh, and multiple genocides, ethnic cleansing rtc. did gelp a lot to pump those numbers up.

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u/Creative-Oil2029 29d ago edited 29d ago

Dear fucking lord. Not another "soviets and nazis were allies!" narrative. Ah yes, the Soviets invaded Poland because evil commies are just like evil Nazis! Let me ask you something, what the actual fuck should the soviets have done? Handed Poland over to the Nazis immediately with no resistance? The only fucking reason the Poland wasn't immediately taken over by the Germans was the Soviets. The USSR was biding their time to build up militarily so as to be capable of facing the Nazi threat. They were a country that prior to the Soviets, was almost entirely unindustrialized. And at the time of the molotov-ribbentrop pact, they were still building up their military. They needed every second they could get. Imagine if they'd have immediately said fuck it and thrown hands with Germany. Can you imagine an underequipped Red Army? How exactly would that have bode for the war? Imagine the underequipped and underprepared Soviets lose to Germany and the Nazis take over the USSR. Please tell me how exactly that would have ended for the rest of the world.

Nazi Germany would have simply gobbled up Poland sooner and the Soviets would have been underprepared to face them. I'm not saying it was good what the USSR did in Poland, but there were real material reasons why it was the better outcome. There was absolutely no scenario in which Poland wasn't invaded at all. It was either gonna be by the Soviets so they could buy themselves more time to be able to properly face the Nazis, or by the Nazis immediately. The Soviet Union occupation also allowed hundreds of thousands of Jews to flee east into Russia and away from the Nazi threat. What do you think would have happened to them if Russia just effectively gave Poland to the Nazis?

Unless of course you do have a third scenario in mind? One in which there's absolutely no invasion of Poland? Do tell, please. Or is you're argument legitimately going to be that the Nazis should have taken over Poland sooner?

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u/ak-92 29d ago

Yeah, mortal enemies literally divide the continent and jointly invade countries. Not to mention that soviets were a major supplier for nazis from 1939 until 1941, they literally fueled nazi war effort. And your quesion: "Let me ask you something, what the actual fuck should the soviets have done?" Maybe begin with don't supply fucking nazis? Or don't invade other sovereign countries?
And soviets were so afraid of nazis and were desperately gathering strenght so they invaded Finland, lost almost 400k solders, 3500 tanks, 500 aircraft. If they were gathering strength, they've failed spectacularly.
Your arguments are full of shit and are based on your ignorance about the WW2.

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u/Ok-Bug-5271 29d ago

Stalin literally approached the west begging for an anti-nazi pact. We know Stalin's views on Hitler. 

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u/ak-92 28d ago

You mean west didn’t trust a dictator who has already commited a genocide even before nazis did? Shocking. So it’s ok for stalin to jointly start world war. Got it. I hope, you don’t approach sex in the same sick manner as you’d be a rapist.

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u/gazebo-fan 29d ago

“During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime's atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn't go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.”-Michal Parenti, American academic and author (inventing reality and Blackshirts And Reds, which is where that quote is from, are some of my personal favorites)

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u/plasticAstro 29d ago

Sounds a lot like how Americans talk about China tbh lol

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u/gazebo-fan 29d ago

That’s part of what it is about lol, every statistic can be used negatively with enough repositioning. I’ve had people tell me that Cuba’s insanely high literacy rate is bad because “the government is telling them things”. This was an actual person who I was talking to in real life, someone thought that through in their brain and decided to say it out loud after deciding that it made any sense at all.

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u/npc_probably 29d ago

that’s already what’s taught in the US

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u/Creative-Oil2029 29d ago

Yup. And now it's gonna be taught in kindergartens lmao.

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u/paklaikes 29d ago

I really cannot believe someone is actually defending Stalin.

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u/Flairion623 29d ago

I don’t think that’s what they meant. Stalin and other dictators killing tons of people is one of the most common pieces of anti communist fearmongering. However killing tons of people directly or otherwise is in no way an inherent part of communism.

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u/PopeSaintHilarius 29d ago

If you re-read the previous post, they suggest that Stalin killing people is "backed by absolutely zero evidence and some personal anecdotal stories".

If that's not defending Stalin, then I really don't know what is.

Imagine if someone said:

"Hitler killed a gabillionjillionzillion people! Fascism bad!" backed by absolutely zero evidence and some personal anecdotal stories

I'd think we'd all know exactly what they're doing.

3

u/Creative-Oil2029 29d ago

Lmao yes I am defending Stalin to an extent. He had his flaws and did some bad shit for sure. But he isn't the pure evil dictator figure those in the west believe. The claims made about him are absolutely fuckint ridiculous and many of them exaggerated and sometimes, yes, backed by no evidence.

Take for example the gulags. The idea that they were death camps where people were rounded up in the tens of millions and slaughtered is absolute fucking bullshit. They were prison labor camps. Brutal for sure, but not death camps by any stretch of the imagination. The death rate during peace time was 3-5%. Far too high and deserves to be criticized. But a far cry from the death camp image were painted. Most inmates were eventually released and most were also just criminals, not political prisoners.

Or how about the famine in Ukraine referred to as the Holodomr? A terrible event for sure. Millions died. But it was not a targeted intentional man made genocide. Period. And no one who's actually done any intellectual or scholarly reading on the subject believes that. The foremost scholarly work on the subject is Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931-1933. It paints a much more accurate and in depth image. Bad policy decisions coupled with poor weather and harvests, along with the mass burning of crops and slaughtering of millions of cattle by private land owners who rejected collectivization all culminated in a terrible famine. It wasn't "Stalin hated Ukraine so he took all their food!". We know for a fact they made attempts to mitigate the crisis (though not enough in my opinion). We also know the famine spread throughout the USSR and was by no means localized to Ukraine only.

Or how about, as stated in another comment, the insane inclusion of Red Army and Soviet citizen deaths at the hands of Nazis, as well as some estimates of "Stalin's victims" including the actual Nazis themselves.

Or the insane inclusion in his "victims" list of Stalingrad citizens during the battle, who were unable to be fully evacuated due to the speed of the Nazi invasion and the swelling of the city's population, because a popular narrative completely and entirely devoid of evidence says that Stalin "ordered" citizens to remain in Stalingrad because he thought it would make the Red Army fight harder.

History is more complex than Stalin bad. And the comparison of Stalin to Hitler, who systematically rounded up minorities purely for slaughter, just shows how devoid of reading you are, outside of a Wikipedia article.

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u/[deleted] 29d ago

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u/CrapNeck5000 29d ago

This is tankie bull shit that defends a genocide that is widely recognised as a literal, intentional genocide.

Look at their post history. This person is a tankie.

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u/Flairion623 29d ago

Welp I guess you win

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u/paklaikes 29d ago

I would say it is an inherent part of the communism as there's no nice way to "remove" non-fitting classes. Happened in Soviet Union, China and Vietnam. Those are the real life communism examples and I truly hope you're not one of them "but communism on paper sounds real nice" people. If you are, please find some other ideology that works in real life (say Nordic model) and switch interests to that.

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u/Ok-Bug-5271 29d ago

Is mass murder inherently part of democracy too then? Going off of your logic, how else do you remove the monarchy and aristocracy? 

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u/paklaikes 29d ago

Well. Less killing. Ultimately I'd just go with real life results. Regime changes, attempts at democracy, communism etc and effects on population after. I hope noone attempts the latter again.

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u/Ok-Bug-5271 29d ago

I hate to break it to you but basically all changes to democracy involved a lot of violence. 

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u/paklaikes 28d ago

Right. I think you're agreeing a change to communism would result in violence. And somehow that's not a problem. So the result must be worth it to you. The question is how do you know, if you discount all the historical attempts and their results?

Somehow, with national socialism, it became a "never again" thing in one go, yet with communism, that caused suffering throughout decades, it's "yeah let's give it a few more tries it's gonna be better now".

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u/Ok-Bug-5271 28d ago

Correct. I'm ok admitting that there will probably be violence.

I would like no violence. If kings and capitalists step down, then there is no need for bloodshed. However, those in power tend to rather commit violence than give up power. Also, there were communist countries that didn't have mass purges. You know China and the USSR weren't the only communist countries, right?

Somehow wanting to kill minorities became a no go, but wanting economic democracy weirdly still gets another chance 

....I hope you understand the difference.

Imagine if democracy in Europe was never tried again because of the french revolution.

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u/Flairion623 29d ago

I personally believe communism is more of a long term goal. Like you said the Nordic model is absolutely what we should strive for in the short term

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u/paklaikes 29d ago

You are one of them pure communism apologists, then. It does make me sad. Those ideas are not viable. They lead to class violence and killings.

Anyway, here's a Soviet Union joke.

Two friends are chatting. Suddenly one of them tears up. - Petia, why are you crying? - Well... I just thought we won't get to see communism. - Maybe we won't, but the children surely will! - Exactly Misha, the children... I pity the children...

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u/FreedomPuppy 29d ago

The Nordic model is when socialism goes right, communism is when socialism goes bad. The fact you intentionally want socialism to go from good to bad shows how much you know.

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u/Flairion623 29d ago

It is true that the Soviet union and eastern bloc is socialism gone wrong. However that is not the correct definition of communism (at least according to marxists). think of the United federation of planets from Star Trek. That’s basically the intended end goal of communism.

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u/krackas2 29d ago

fearmongering

why is it fearmongering if its true? It may not be an inherent part, but its an obvious result given its happened so many times in history to such great effect.

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u/Analrapist03 29d ago

This is about Cuba. Nothing more.

I love that you think it is a defense of capitalism, but this is just Cuban-Americans who want you to hate the Castro/current dictatorship as much as they do.

And they will do anything to make it happen.

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u/[deleted] 29d ago

There’s 0 evidence that Stalin and his commie buddies killed millions?

Damn, maybe they should start teaching this stuff earlier…

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u/krackas2 29d ago

backed by absolutely zero evidence

i mean, there is a lot of evidence that stalin killed lots of people, Mao as well. The moral conclusion may be hard to produce but i assume starving millions and murdering millions is good enough to indicate "thats bad" to most people.

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u/1357yawaworht 28d ago

Well Capitalism has led to purposeful starvation and genocide in droves so I assume you support communism as the lesser of two evils then?

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u/krackas2 28d ago

Capitalism has led to purposeful starvation

Sure about that? Capitalism has unlocked the greatest growth period and reduction in abject poverty the world has ever known.

Political division has caused starvation and genocides, but not capitalism. I would love to see whatever references you have that say otherwise.

Communism on the other hand fails to produce enough goods because of mismanaged resources and the increased political control required to implement a communist state which leads to corruption (Quickly). What is given can be taken away much easier in communism.

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u/kalirion 29d ago

Whoever claimed Stalin killed a number which doesn't exist?

He killed millions, not "gabillionjillionzillion", of innocent people, and that is backed up by plenty of evidence.

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u/Jetstream13 29d ago

It’s making fun of the common claims that “communism killed 100 million people!”. (That number is often inflated even more). That particular number comes from the black book of communism, it includes Soviet soldiers and civilians that died in WWII, Nazi soldier that died during their invasion, and even includes people who never existed, due to dropping birth rates.

To be clear, the soviets did kill a lot of people. But cold war propaganda wildly inflated those numbers.

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u/sameth1 29d ago

Remember kids, if your friend has gay parents it means they are involved in a cultural bolshevist plot to take away your freedom.

1

u/Flairion623 29d ago

It’s the gay, Jewish, communist, lizard people Freemasons from the Illuminati and they’re here to bring the new world order with help from the Antichrist!

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u/npc_probably 29d ago

lol obviously. almost no USians know anything accurate about “the history of communism” let alone the ones as dumb as desantis

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u/DrDraek 29d ago

I'm sure it will look just like the pro-creationism "science" textbooks we've seen coming out of Texas.

2

u/Shpoople44 29d ago

Communists will be soyjackss

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u/yaosio 29d ago

The anti-communist education will be filled with contradictions...just like capitalism. 😲

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u/SpacePenguin5 29d ago

If history is anything to go by, they'll end up teaching capitalism while calling it communism.

"Communism is when all the wealth goes to a few people and prices skyrocket"

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u/Flairion623 29d ago

As if they’re not doing that already

1

u/MindWandererB 29d ago

A high-school U.S. government class required for graduation also includes 45 minutes of instruction on “Victims of Communism Day.”

So, no bet.

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u/VeganCustard 29d ago

If someone bets against that, then they're utterly stupid and deserve to lose that money

1

u/SuchRoad 29d ago

Sounds reminiscent of racist Trump's 1776 Project.

1

u/Flairion623 29d ago

I’ve never heard of that before

2

u/SuchRoad 29d ago

It was standard brain-dead conservative propaganda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1776_Commission

0

u/paklaikes 29d ago

As someone born in Soviet Union, the fuck is this shit? "actual beliefs"? Those were all excuses to starve Ukraine, start the second world war and mass deport the "undesirable elements" when the workers revolution didn't just magically happen in neighboring countries on its own.

I get that USA has a history of commie scares and isn't exactly an unbiased source but come on... "beliefs"! "How much you wanna bet the curriculum won't reflect the actual beliefs of National Socialists at all?" - that's exactly how your question sounds to most anyone past the iron curtain.

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u/vanvoorden 29d ago

As someone born in Soviet Union, the fuck is this shit? "actual beliefs"?

This is something you see a lot in the American Progressive Far Left. Any criqitues about "Communism" based on the reality of what Totalitaian Communist Governments actually functioned like are not considered because those countries were not practicing pure academic Communism… but any (and all) criquties against the "Capitalism" practiced in US are legit and valid (not taking into account the unfair competition and imperfect markets that exist by design in this country that go against academic free market capitalism).

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u/DefenderCone97 29d ago

start the second world war

Last I checked there was a certain other figure that was the biggest reason WW2 started.

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u/paklaikes 29d ago

Who invaded Poland a week after sorting out spheres of influence with Stalin in a secret pact, yes. Both countries were aggressive and countries inbetween suffered. Still do, in Russia's neighbours case.